Until the End of the World

By Steven Holding

Open Short Story Competition Winner

You said that you would wait for me forever. I keep the letter, handwritten by you over twenty years ago, hidden in my purse, safely tucked away in-between my driving licence and supermarket loyalty card. I have folded and unfolded the single sheet of A4 paper so many times, that over the years it has begun to resemble a treasure map from some boy’s own adventure story. Strange really, as I don’t need to read it in order to remember your words.

You said that I shone like the stars.

I was your first, I suppose. For me, well, there had been others. Crushes, flings, the usual crazy teenage infatuations. Even something so serious that at the time it had convinced the seventeen-year-old version of myself that I knew absolutely everything there was to possibly know about the thing that soul crooners seemed to spell L-U-R-V-E. I was slap bang in the middle of the heavy aftermath of that particular experience when you wandered into my life. I can recall it all with a clarity that seems so exact, that it shocks me to actually calculate the distance between then and now. Sat in that dingy old pub, where the only good things going for it were the jukebox and the landlord’s lax attitude towards underage drinking, nursing a broken heart and a half of Woodpecker cider. I was crying onto the shoulder of my best friend Mary when you stumbled in, leaning on your mates, singing along to that song that I had wasted all of my change on playing it on constant repeat.